Razer Stealth 13 – 1 month review

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I took the jump off of MacOS about a month ago now. I’d been researching different options ever since the Macbook Pros came out with the ridiculous touch bar, horrible keyboards, high price and pretty mediocre specs (for that price).

In the end I pulled the trigger on a Razer Stealth 13 Ultrabook that I picked up from Amazon on Prime Day for a pretty good deal. Spec wise, it compared very favorably against both my old laptop (5 year old Macbook Pro) and new Macbooks. I also strongly considered a thinkpad among other similar laptops.

I wanted something with pretty good specs as I often end up running “heavier” – i.e. running docker, virtualbox, etc. Good keyboad, reliability, power usage and weight were all important as well. I travel a lot, so it had to be a laptop I could use in many different scenarios, working on a bed/couch/tiny desk, etc – but usually without external monitor/mouse/keyboar.

All in all, I’m quit happy with this laptop after about a month of using it – most of the time on the road. Battery life is at least double my old macbook – depending on what I’m doing, I can get 8 hours out of it pretty easily. The keyboard and screen are great. My only real gripe is the touchpad “click” is too sensitive (even with settings turned all the way down) – I’m guessing I’ll get used to it.

Windows 10 is… well, Windows. I’d still prefer MacOS. But the additional of WSL means that I spend nearly all of my work day using linux. This means I haven’t (yet) decided to try booting and running entirely from Linux. Might still happen, but for now this setup is working pretty well.

I haven’t really tried much gaming so I can’t comment on performance there. I ran a couple very old FPS games that were in my Steam account which of course it could run fine with maxed out settings. I played a little bit of Total War Empire – which of course is also an older game at this point, and ran well.

So… so far so good! Of course it’s early days still and we’ll see what problems arise 🙂